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Every tablet or other LCD device I've owned to date has had an SD slot. None of my Eink readers have.
My old Pocket PC and Palm T|X needed the storage badly. There just wasn't enough internal storage to keep anything resembling a library on either. Both my tablets have come with 32GB of storage and a card slot. I read a lot of comics and use Zinio so the space tends to go pretty quickly.
For a dedicated Eink reader though, I don't think the SD card is crucial. Sure, I understand the idea of wanting to keep everything on one device so it's all right there to read whenever I want it. What keeps me from doing it isn't storage space, it's file handling.
Most readers choke on anything over a thousand books, and I personally find that wading through a flat file system of a thousand entries at 10-20 per page is mind-numbing. So for me, the Kindle overloads to the point of uselessness before it runs out of storage.
Nook's a different case because BN limited your sideloaded documents to a small fraction of the available storage. It needed the expandable memory. Amazon doesn't have that restriction on Kindle, so it's not as important.
Anyone who really wants an SD card slot can find a reader that has one. Amazon's omission isn't a matter of them wanting control or to shift everyone to the cloud, just a recognition that it's a luxury rather than a necessity for the vast majority of their customers. They don't need it for its designed purpose, and filling one up provides an inferior user experience. It's not worth it to Amazon.
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